Highlights from the Dave Ramsey Show

QUESTION: Elena in Los Angeles says her parents lost their home of 27 years and are having financial problems. Elena has a $150,000 inheritance from her grandparents, and her parents asked for money from her. She's getting a guilt trip and isn't sure how to respond. Dave has some hard words for Elena.

ANSWER: Your father is a manipulator. We are not going to set up that opportunity to continue. I want you to read the book Boundaries by Dr. Henry Cloud. Your father violates boundaries pretty regularly. It makes you confused as to what your role is. You are a very bright and educated person, and yet this one part of your life makes you feel like you're six years old. That book will dramatically help you. It helps you realize you're not crazy.

Your brain knows what to do but your emotions have trouble doing it. You can do some short-term things to help them turn the corner and get them back on their feet. In return, they are going to change some lifelong behaviors that are destructive to them. You won't have any more private meetings with your father at his insistence; your husband will always be present. Your mother should probably also attend because your dad's schemes and scams are all on the side.

We really want to help them. We really love them. Participating in their wackiness is not helping. That's all it comes down to. You have to smile. Instead of this being "dad," you look at this as a person with a deficit of some kind. You just smile and nod your head and say how sweet that is and you figuratively pat him on the head.

Then you say how you will help. You take that position because that way, you are doing this from a nobility status, not a neediness or toxic family script status. You are not doing anything long term. It's short term. You buy the seed and they get to plant it. Then they must hoe it and harvest it. But you are not buying the seed and buying the tractor and hiring the guy to drive the tractor.

You are not getting involved in giving them $200 a month or $800 a month or $8,000 a month for the rest of their lives just because they had you. That's not how this works. That ongoing sense of entitlement has to be snapped in the conversation.

You love your family and you want to help them turn the corner on something. But when you subsidize them permanently, you take away their dignity, like a government program. You permanently change someone's dignity, their status and their ability to stand on their own two feet and do things. You don't want to do that with anybody you love or care about. Instead we want to buy them boots and teach them to wear them.

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Question: Angela in Connecticut has a 21-year-old son she decided to help for a year while he established himself. She stood back and watched him flounder after she stopped helping him. He's struggling, and she wants to help him now without giving him money. What's the best way to do that?

Answer: You've really helped him because you've helped him to have some problems. His decisions before had no consequences. This is very helpful to him. It's going to be the worst time in your life and the best time in his life.

It is one of the most painful things to do in the world to watch somebody you love be stupid—especially your own kids. It is almost as if he's manipulating you—intentionally or unintentionally—by pitching out all the dumb things he's doing for shock effect. He'll become a travel agent for guilt trips if you let him.

If he's hurting bad enough, you can offer help with conditions attached to it. The conditions are him heading in good directions—not bad directions. If he can be trusted and his integrity is intact, you could say, "If you will cut up this credit card and close the account and promise not to open any more of them, I will match you dollar for dollar as you pay it off." Then you're encouraging him A) to stop borrowing and B) to clean up his debt, and you're bribing him a little bit into doing that. But he won't do that if he doesn't think the credit card is a problem. If it's started to be a problem, if he's started to have issues, then there we go. Or the payday lender—the same thing. You could say, "I'll match you to help you get out of this payday lender because I think you now have realized and you're repentant that what you were doing is stupid. If you prove that by never going to a payday lender again, that's our contract. My contract with you is I will match you dollar for dollar as you pay out the payday lender. But if you break your word, the checks are over forever."

I think you're on track. The other thing you can do is if it's not a match, you can just encourage any positive behavior. In other words, something like, "If you'll go to Financial Peace University at your local church and go through the nine classes and have the coordinator send me an email each night that you attend the class and you have 100% attendance, I'll do this: X or Y." Put him in an environment where he has peer pressure to do positive things instead of hanging out with his idiot roommates.

It's very painful to watch your children do stupid. I think it may be the hardest phase of parenting. When they're little, you're a god and you can just tell them what to do. It's a lot easier. Their needs are fairly basic. It's poop and food. Then they move up to a few more emotional and spiritual needs, and then they move into a few other things, but then letting them do their own thing and do it wrong is—wow! That's tough. I think that's why we have so many parents in America who have become enablers when we find out that a huge percentage of 27-year-old males still live in their mom's basement. We've lost a generation of manhood doing that.

It's just not against the law to be stupid. We wouldn't have enough jails. It's hard to watch. I think you're on the right track. I think you're being very kind and very strong, and you so far have been able to endure the pain that you feel watching him do this. I will give you Financial Peace University for him to go through, but I want you to use it on him as a part of a weapon for his own benefit—not a manipulative weapon. In other words, "I'll do this if you pay off this card or if you work this extra job or if you don't make this bad decision. If you go through this class, I'll do something else for you." We're rewarding good behaviors, and we are starving out by not funding the bad behaviors. Write the checks directly to whatever you're paying for so that it doesn't accidentally go to partying or other things you don't want it to go to.

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Question: Seth in Baton Rouge says a friend of his has a gambling problem, and Seth is worried it's going to plague him his whole life if he doesn't get control of it. He's tried recommending some books, but at this point, Seth doesn't know how to approach the situation. Dave suggests taking a bold approach with compassion.

Dave Ramsey's advice: If this is a close-enough friend, and you see that he's got a gun to his head, you would scream, "Don't shoot!" even if it hurt his feelings. If this is a close-enough friend, and he was driving at 80 miles an hour down a highway where the bridge was out, you would scream, "Don't go off the cliff! Slow down! Stop! Turn around!" That would be compassionate in both cases even though you screamed and made him uncomfortable. To avoid this is not compassion. To directly interfere is compassion.

I guess I would start with just a real serious one-on-one conversation—no ambient noise, not in a restaurant, no television on, no other things going on. We're not heading to a party. You have a real serious concern, and you care enough about him to hurt his feelings for his own good, and he's in the land of stupid. He's about to screw up his life forever.

If you're not a good-enough friend to stop him from hurting himself, then you're not a good-enough friend to be friends the rest of your lives. You're just an acquaintance. You don't have an obligation with acquaintances to interfere in their lives. But with close friends and people you care deeply about, you do have that obligation.

I think the other thing I would do is go on some gambling websites and read. Learn a little bit about what he's facing and how he's feeling. Just talk to him about it as a friend. You're not a mental health professional doing an intervention here. You're not a counselor. You're not a pastor. You're just a friend telling him he's doing something stupid and about to really hurt himself and put himself in a mess.

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